Peace Corps Response originally began as the Crisis Corps. It was designed to send RPCVs overseas in short term assignments to help in emergency situations. Peace Corps Response utilized RPCVs unique cultural and language experience. Peace Corps Response Volunteers also helped prepare countries when Peace Corps was re entering previously closed countries, such as Colombia. In 2010, Peace Corps expanded the Response program to include non-professionals with ten years of experience in needed skills. Originally, the assignments were short term; three months to a year. Peace Corps Response Volunteers may have a week of orientation, but the short term nature of their assignment does not allow for the intensive language and cross-cultural training that traditional Volunteers receive. This new partnership will bring IBM professional teams to designed countries for four weeks to work with serving Peace Corps Volunteers and Host Country Counterparts on specialized projects. Here is the press release from the . . .

At some point you’ll want to ask “someone” to read your novel while it is still in manuscript. This might be your partner or a friend who loves to read, or one of those strangers in your writing class. When that time comes, I want you to recall the exchange between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald when Hemingway asked F. Scott to read his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Fitzgerald did, and then wrote a letter to Ernie. This was in 1926. Fitzgerald suggested to Hemingway that he drop the first two chapters, characterizing the novel’s opening as “careless and ineffectual.” Fitzgerald then went on to write in his letter to Hemingway: “About this time, I can hear you say, ‘Jesus this guy thinks I’m lousy, & he can stick it up his ass for all I give a Gd Dm for his ‘criticism’. But remember this is . . .

On January 13th at the New York Public Library (5:45 pm) there will be an evening to celebrate Harris Wofford. Harris helped Sargent Shriver start the Peace Corps and organized the Ethiopia program, serving as Peace Corps Director for Sub-Saharan Africa. He later become a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania and was president of two colleges, an advisor to President Kennedy and to Martin Luther King. On the evening of January 13th, he’ll be interviewed live by George Stephanopoulos and we will see an exclusive preview from the upcoming documentary on Harris’s life, including his return to Ann Arbor 50 years after John Kennedy’s 2 am speech where he first proposed the Peace Corps. This event is being organized to raise the funding needed to complete the documentary by Harris’s 90th birthday next April. It normally costs $150 to attend; however, a limited number of $50 tickets are available here: wofforddocny.eventbrite.com RSVP today. Act fast. . . .